The Mind Robber

Dear Gary—

“Don’t worry, Jamie, we’re safe in the TARDIS.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well . . .”

“I mean, has the TARDIS ever been buried up to its neck in lava before?”

“Well, no.”

“Well, how can you be so sure we’re going to be all right?”

Well . . . that’s the gist of the Doctor’s and Jamie’s relationship. The Doctor is always sure, even when he isn’t really, and Jamie is always skeptical, even when he has every confidence the Doctor will make things right in the end.

To escape the lava the Doctor uses the TARDIS emergency unit, something he is hesitant to do as it will take them out of the time and space dimension—out of reality.

“Fine, reality’s getting too hot anyway,” says Jamie.

But when they exit reality, well . . . they are “nowhere; it’s as simple as that.” And it is this, the unknown, which worries the Doctor.

He has used the emergency unit to appease Jamie, but now he is worried. “We’re on our way alright,” he says, but “trouble is I don’t know where to.”

That doesn’t worry Jamie. It was the known threat of lava bearing down on the TARDIS he was worried about. “Well, that’s not unusual,” he says of the unknown factor. But “where in time and space am I,” the Doctor frets.

Where they are, it turns out, is a world of fiction, of words, “a place where nothing is impossible.” A unicorn rushes them, a Minotaur menaces them, a Medusa rivets them. All they need do, however, is declare that the threat doesn’t exist and it vanishes. Seems easy. But no.  Nothing is easy. Jamie and Zoe find it hard to refute the evidence of their eyes. And the Doctor finds it hard to refute a character he has never heard of before. Confronted with Karkus, a comic strip hero of Zoe’s era, the Doctor says he never heard of him and therefore can’t state with conviction that he is fictional. Luckily for the Doctor Zoe knows martial arts and can defeat Karkus, (rather too easily for a super hero, but oh well . . .).

It is amusing, this world of words that our trio has “tumbled into.” From Gulliver who wanders in and out of scenes spouting nothing but lines written for him, to Rapunzel who lets down her hair for all and sundry to climb despite the disappointment that none are princes, all entertain. And when the Doctor accidentally reassembles Jamie’s face for an episode and a half (to accommodate the absence of the actor Frazer Hines who was out with the chicken pox) you have to laugh.

But it is deadly as well. If they can’t disbelieve them out of existence and they can’t physically defeat them or outsmart them, these fictional threats become very real. And when you add white robots into the mix—are they real or are they not?

And when they themselves are in danger of becoming fictionalized it is time for the Doctor to take some serious action. “When somebody writes about an incident after it’s happened,” he says, “that’s history. But when the writing comes first—that’s fiction.” Therefore when the Master (not the Time Lord Master of later stories) writes Zoe and Jamie into a book and manipulates the Doctor into the machinery of the place to take over as head writer, well, things look pretty grim for our adventurers.

Not to worry. The Doctor can write up some heroes to counter the Master’s foes, and he can write Jamie and Zoe some effective escape techniques so that they can do some creative writing of their own.

It all gets rather jumbled at the end, however. This wonderful fictional world that they “tumbled into” doesn’t quite get the literary justice it deserves. The story devolves into a plot to take over the Earth which doesn’t make any clear sense. Somehow the creative brain power of Man acts as “a power house—a life line as you might say,” for the Master Brain behind this whole scheme. And somehow this power will transfer all the peoples of Earth to this world of fiction leaving the Earth uninhabited and ripe for takeover, but for what purpose and by who is undefined.

In the midst of all the fiction, though, it is nice to see a little bonding between the Doctor and Zoe. Zoe has the education and book smarts that Jamie lacks. “What it is to have an arithmetical brain, eh?” the Doctor says admiringly as Zoe works out the problem of the maze they are caught in. She does her share of screaming, but Zoe adds an intellectual element to the trio that complements the Doctor.

It is this element of reality, this essence of companionship, which grounds our trio and helps them defeat the Master Brain.  The Doctor might worry about the unknown, reality might be too hot for Jamie, but together, and with the addition of the arithmetically minded Zoe, we are sure they will come out right in the end.

And so, Gary, I leave as abruptly as this story ends . . .